Course starts with virtual world field trips to educational sims in Second Life. Week 2 introduces Machinima and its educational uses. Week 3 is an adventure in the MMORPG World of Warcraft with an educators' guild. Week 4 wraps up the tours on the Bleeding Edge with emerging tech and education that includes virtual, blended and augmented realities.

Task Discussion

Missed Last night (Wednesday)... Spent evening Screencasting and partaking in "Follow The Sun" @Australia contingency. I legitimately said G'Day and Mate more than once and they liked it! LOL (cool) .. Just as informative and encouraging attending this in-world global function.. I posted a 15 minute Screencast to Scoop.it page http://www.scoop.it/t/educating-in-the-21st-century-shift-happens and tweeted with Jason Silva @jason_silva DO see this up and coming Technology RockStar here: https://vimeo.com/38061982 ... What I'm trying to say is that I had options a plenty for in-world activities last night that took the entire night and (again) into the wee hours :)

I am "off" this coming week as we are on Spring break. I will be in attendance in-world on Monday night as our schedule indicates we are meeting then. I also Downloaded and installed Unity 3D las night and watched a segment from Reaction Grid's founder. I might suggest (as educators) feverishly boning up on technology 'chops', that we either create a MOOC after this one, dedicated to immersing ourselves into this or to explore Reaction Grid 3DUnity and the advent of Jibe... This 'movement' it seems is 'welling up' to be THE multi-platform access with insane creation capabilities with CAD-like Mesh tools for creating and rendering ANYTHING FRANKLY that is CGI capable into VR Worlds...(!) WITHIN A BROWSER INTERFACE?! (no less). and.. with access to port inventories, dedicate personal server Islands (of your own) upload and network to grid(s) and grid-jump (he heh).. into all other Sim / grids out there... This is HOT.. and it's looking like the "Singularity" for lack of a better term is running up on us faster than expected in this way. (sweating...)

As I am a huge proponent for educator's getting on the 'Shift Happens' band wagon and teckking up so to say... Even I am beggining to feel the burn from moving really quick as technological morphology with rapidly deploying tools are seemingly being advanced by "others" and I am feeling slightly behind a curve... Slightly. This MOOC is highly watched if not actively participated in from the surge of the "WOW" effect from the recent VWBP Conference... Let's align some attention to new comers and embrace as well as acknowledge the fear factor and Frick it factor (sorry).. What I mean by this is that many don't even have the technology chops to keep up with the Distance Ed MEME (found here) to stay on task from jacking into SL, conforming to time zones, using SL software or in my case an open software (Singularity browser) and searching the Meet up locations through using search engines and back engineering the way for me to find our meet up's because my viewer doesn't Jibe (no punn) with the SLURL as posted from our MOOC (just...sayin'), others might find this too much and drop out in more ways than just the MOOC.

Also there are educator's pumped and psyched to be part of this MOOC Movement that we need to "look backward" and see if we lost them in the dust... Not unlike what we intuitively do for NoOb's in Second Life... The most attractive thing I have seen in Second Life is that most everybody extends leniency, patience, tolerance and enhanced courtesy to make sure others become trained and feel comfortable in-world :) This is the case here too (don't mis-understand me please), I am merely making a suggestion for our decorum going forward as I see that this is a really great venue for us to grab hold of and make SING even more... I was thinking too (oh boy) that maybe I could petition for PD credit from my district for adequately participating in a MOOC. Since there is no accreditation or credits given, as it is purely for personal enhancement and for investinment in one's self for the imminent and encroaching technology shift happening as I speak... PD options given within my school district are effectively a joke, compared to this and to what we are doing as professionals and in entirely a voluntary fashion.. GOOD ON US THEN! and VIVA MOOC! lol.

As we watched the films last night and discussed or heard abut the PROCESS, I think it is pretty clear that as educators, it is the process that is key....particularly as we guide students to create machinma. Not that the products were not great to watch...next time we need to bring popcorn. Consider the learning and purpose in using machinima as a teaching strategy.

In facilitating Machinima development with students:

What kind of learning (Core Curriculum and 21st Century Learning) is taking place for our students?

What objectives may you have/have you had as students create machinima?

What categories might we add in the machinima fest to reward student excellence in various areas?

HI Tanya, I would say that in the interest of contributing toward usable or applicable content creation for K-12 curriculum that we haven't addressed one really. I would like to have more of an effort in gearing toward this frankly. I have offered some suggestions that we take the inertia and initiative we have from membership and active, outgoing collegiality and jump into the "Deep End" with working with 3D Unity and Blender and Jibe with RG also. This would make us all 'bulletproof' essentially, having the work we create from this be stored and available on our own desktops and to be able to "Port it" to any grid we would want to jump on or work with. We could also share and transfer our collective work amongst ourselves and reach other educators in seeking the same peer kniship and collective collegiality as well as outcomes.

Just think if we were collectively working as one cohesive group but in work groups of our own content... We would gather and display and demo our work amongst each other, feely share our work and even give service toward connecting content from differentiating and allied content core's like Science and Literacture and art, as well as literacy and maths...

Penelope and I will be meeting tomorrow, Thursday, at 2:30 STL, on Izzy's sim to work on the saloon set. When would you like to meet as a group? Let us know.

Thanks, Lotus

P.S. I don't have everyone's email address, so I'm going through the course's public channel - hope you (and the rest of the course members) don't mind :). Oh, I may have fixed my audio problem - we'll see.

Hi, this is Aly. I had a major issue with my computer this week and had to reinstall my OS. I am still in the process of applying fixes and downloading programs. I also have been extremely busy at work with students so this is the first time I have been able to check on emails, P2P, etc. I apologize for not being able to take part in this weeks exercises. I should be all downloaded and fixed downloaded soon. Still looking for Quick time for my 64 bit system.